As a designer I embrace critique and feedback
We all know that humans, by nature, have a deep need of feeling important and liked. This is a good reason why we don’t react very well to critical feedback.
It’s not a secret, that whenever we receive feedback that is below our expectations, we become defensive and attack back or close ourselves.
This kind of behaviour will most likely harm any part of our life, but when you are working as a designer this is a deal killer.
In this post I want to show you how critical feedback can get you from some mediocre work which you are happy with, in the beginning, to some good/awesome/better work which you will love in the end.
To give you some background, I’ve been a developer for the past 5 years and I recently started working as a designer. I also paint in my free time but until last night I’ve never done an illustration or a business card.
“It’s time to raise brand awareness”- I thought.
Starting from the idea that I want to show both my design and painting skills in the business card, I started writing phrases on a note:
ux/ui designer
painter
painting as a hobby
design and painting as a hobby
design during the day, painting at night
until I got to “Designer by day, painter by night”.
And then it hit me! One side of the business card should be a day illustration where I present my design skills and design related social links and the other side a night illustration where I present my artistic skills and my art social links.
This is what I came up with, as a starting point:
The first round of feedback, from my UX mentor, Ileana went like this:
“The sun is not round and there is not much difference between day and night”
After the next round of feedback I got :
“You won’t know on which side someone would view you business card so how about making them both look as the front side? Also, why not differentiate more the day from the night? How about expressing everything from a design and art point of view?”
Good points!
Now for the “last” round of feedback:
“Why not make your title look more interesting and point the fact that you have technical feedback?”
Tadaaaam! I really liked the feedback and the improvements that came with it. I decided this will be my final version, until other feedback comes.
I’ll let you draw the conclusions of why being open to any kind of feedback can only benefit you and your business.
Update: The end result:
Please, feel free to leave me any kind of feedback! Don’t forget to clap if you enjoyed reading this!
Cheers!
